September 1, 1939: W. H. Auden and the Afterlife of a Poem

The book is about a poet, a poem, a city, and a world at a point of change, exploring why and how we create and respond to great poetry.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 20 August 2020
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

This is a book about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.

This is a book about a poet – W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left.

About a poem – ‘September 1, 1939’, his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed – or been condemned – to a tragic and unexpected afterlife.

About a city – New York, an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939 about to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world.

And about a world at a point of change – about 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Auden’s poem in its entirety on their editorial pages.

Weight: 258g
Dimension: 130 x 197 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780007557233